An economic alternative for reducing regional air pollution and addressing global warming: Waste Wood to Jet Fuel (CSSS Seminar, 11/14/2018)
Posted: 11/9/2018 (Local Events)
Indroneil Ganguly
Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Center for International Trade in Forest Products (CINTRAFOR), School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, https://environment.uw.edu/faculty/indroneil-ganguly/
Most of us do not realize the level of pollution created by ‘open burning’ of massive volumes of harvest waste, from agricultural and forestry activities, in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). For some of the PNW states, the particulate matter emitted (especially bad for human health) from these ‘planned burns’ are greater than that from their vehicular emissions. The residual woody biomass (a.k.a. harvest slash) produced during forest harvest operations in the Pacific Northwest is also generally collected into piles and burned and/or left on the forest floor to decompose. Producing drop-in biofuels from this residual cellulosic feedstock can provide an alternative use for this unused resource while simultaneously displacing petroleum based fuels. Utilizing a ‘Woods-to-Wake’ (WoTW) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, which is comparable to a Well-to-Wake (WTW) LCA for petroleum based aviation fuel, this paper assesses the environmental implications of feedstock recovery, production, and utilization of residual woody biomass based biojet fuel. In this presentation, I will also discuss a comparative assessment of the environmental implications of substituting petroleum-based jet fuel with that of residual woody biomass based biojet fuel.
Date: 11/14/2018
Time: 12:30–1:30 PM
Location: Savery (SAV) 409